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Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year Is “Feminism”

People gather for the Women's March in Washington D.C., January 21, 2017.

By Shannon Stapleton/Reuters.

In this new era of woke dictionaries, it’s a constant battle to be the wokest. Merriam-Webster’s latest effort is the announcement of their word of the year: feminism. The company’s editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski,told the Associated Press that searches for the word were up 70 percent in 2017, and activity spiked after certain events, like January’s Women’s March.

Merriam-Webster’s choice comes as no big surprise in a year that opened with the Women’s March and closed with the “Me Too” movement to denounce sexual assault and harassment. “Feminism,” of course, isn’t new, and the word had earned a spot in the Top 10 list in 2014 and 2015. The definition of the word, however, is evolving, and has a much different meaning than it did when it was first added to the dictionary in 1841.

“It was a very new word at that time,” Sokolowski told A.P. “[Noah Webster’s] definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today. His definition was, ‘The qualities of females,’ so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness.”

Like Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com chose a word that enjoyed a bit of buzz this year thanks to the political climate: complicit. Searches for the word went up in April after Ivanka Trump told Gayle King on CBS This Morning that she didn’t know what it meant. The moment was later spoofed by Scarlett Johansson on Saturday Night Live, and Merriam-Webster even tweeted out a link to the definition to help refresh Trump’s memory.

In the end though, Merriam-Webster settled on “feminism,” another word that Ivanka Trump seems to struggle with.

“The word feminism was being used in a kind of general way,” Sokolowski told A.P. “But it was also used in a kind of specific way: What does it mean to be a feminist in 2017? Those kinds of questions are the kinds of things, I think, that send people to the dictionary.”

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